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Posts tagged ‘Red-Gate’

After using the beta for couple of weeks I am really impressed. Everything is easy, UI is intuitive and you don’t need lots of configuration to make this work. You can setup basic daily backup work in just matter of minutes. If you got Azure storage or Amazon S3 account ready. If not then it still does not take long. You spend most of the time digging up usernames and passwords not figuring out how things work! Splendid.

So let’s go through how to do daily Azure SQL backup into Amazon S3 storage.

Red-Gate Cloud Service Dashboard is really clean and simple. Just select the action you want to perform.

First after registering to Red-Gate Cloud Services and login select “Backup SQL Azure to Amazon S3” from Dashboard.

Just fill in the Azure SQL credentials and Amazon S3 keys.

Secondly just fill in Azure SQL server name xxxxxxx..database.windows.net, login credentials to that DB and press refresh button next to Database drop down. Select database that you want to backup. Next click on the “AWS Security Credentials” link and login to your Amazon AWS account. You will be taken directly to place where you can find the keys.

Note that you need S3 Bucket. If you don’t have one you can create it from here https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/home I will not explain how that is done, but it is really easy. After you have inserted Amazon keys you can press the refresh button next to Bucket dropdown in Red-Gate UI. Just fill in the name that you want your backup file to have. Don’t worry about the day stamp because this tool will add date at the end of the filename. Press “continue” button to select scheduling options or backup now.

Just select when you want your daily backup to run or just press "Backup now" button.

Next just fill in exact time you want your backup in 24h format, select time zone, select week days when to run this and press schedule button. You can also just press backup now button for one time backup. Note that there is also a monthly backup option.

You should see your scheduled backup in next screen. When your first backup is done it appears here under history header.

Next you are taken into schedules and history view. Here you can view details of the upcoming backup operation, cancel it or invocate backup now. Just move your mouse over the upcoming event.

Just move mouse on top of scheduled backup job and you can cancel job or invocate it to happen right now.

When backup job has been successfully completed you will receive an email and a “log” line will appear in “schedules and backup history”.

If job is successful or not it will appear here under history title

You can view details of executed jobs by moving mouse on top of history line. If you backup job has run into errors you will see an error triangle as well as receive error message via email. Email also contains a direct link to that specific History log line. Neat!

If you backup job has exceptions it has warning icon in history. Details link will contain error message of what went wrong.

Clicking on the link on the email will direct you to same view as clicking “details” next to completed job.

Here you can read throught what happened while executing backup. If you ran into errors they are also present. Just scroll down from the bar.

If you got your backup run cleanly you should see the created pacbac file in Amazon S3 bucket.

Backup file is safe and sound in Amazon S3

Note that you can just as easily use Azure Storage services or use FTP to upload the backup to you own backup architecture.

There are couple of missing features that I would like to see. For example similar choice than in Red-Gate backup tool to first create copy of database (for transactional safety) and ability to encrypt the backup file before it is uploaded into Amazon or Azure storages. But event without these small features this is still awesome!